From time to time, someone in the agile community mentions "The Agile Engineering Practices." In most cases, it's an article where the author condemns those practices while naming some of the reasons why they're "considered harmful". After the publication, the next thing to come is someone commenting about how the last article was totally untrue or that the previous author didn't have a slightest clue about what "Engineering Practices" are anyway. I thought I'd come up with a neat cheat sheet to elucidate some of the mysterious terms involved in this discussion.

Over the past decade, Ruby on Rails development became one of the most widely used solutions for creation of web apps. As we all know, the tech environment is changing so rapidly that it's hard to keep up with all the new coding methods. Yet RoR proved to be the solid solution for anyone who wants to quicken the development process and enable enterprises to save time and money.

The world of DevOps thrives on process enhancement, improvement of the Application Lifecycle Management and above all - the culture change. During the last couple of years, we've seen enormous amounts of information about potential benefits of changing the culture during a project. Yet the actual way of going about it remains a mystery.

When collaborating with clients who had their first glimpses of agile methodology, I always tend to look at their product backlog first. Why is that? Because most of the time, the quality of the backlog is equal to the quality of the team's work. To be honest, the majority of the backlogs prepared by the beginning product owners don't have this "high quality" feature. In most cases, the primary reason for that is lack of acceptance criteria in the user stories.

In agile development community, we get a lot of "what if" questions. "What if the product owner decides to change a story in the middle of the sprint? What if he adds a new story altogether?" or "What if a crucial team member slips on banana peel and becomes immobile for a significant period of time?"